Behind California's dysfunction

California, it's been observed, is a canary in the socioeconomic mine, telling the rest of the nation what to expect in the future, for better or worse.

If so, then the rest of the nation had best be prepared for fragmentation, which is the only word that fully captures the division of a once-cohesive society into its many component parts.

How else does one explain, for instance, that a state whose wounded economy still ranks among the global leaders has the nation's fourth-lowest rate of medical insurance coverage, as a new Census Bureau data dump confirms?

How else does one explain that California, with about 12 percent of the nation's population, is home to more than 30 percent of its welfare recipients? Or that it spends more of its budget than any other state on prisons? Or that its academic achievement scores and its traffic congestion are at or near the bottom among the states while its unemployment rate is near the top?

Underlying those and many other vexing political and economic issues is, almost everyone now agrees, dysfunctional governance. And no small factor, as well as an illustration of the state's fragmentation, is the evolution in the body politic over the last several decades.

The Field Research Corp., the state's oldest polling organization, charts that change – and the even greater change in the larger population – in its latest examination of the state's electorate, surveying thousands of Californians about who they are and how they orient themselves politically and confirming the previous anecdotal observations.

The Field Poll contrasts 1978 – a watershed year in which the landmark property tax limit, Proposition 13, was passed – with 2009. Among its findings:

California's white non-Latino population has dipped 26.1 percent over the last 31 years, but the proportion of white voters has dropped by just 18 percent, meaning the ethnic gap between voters and nonvoters has actually increased.

The share of the electorate held by the two major parties, more than 90 percent in 1978, has dropped to under 76 percent as the ranks of independents have swelled from less than 8 percent to 20 percent, with most of that shift coming at the expense of Democrats.

Voters are markedly older than they were in 1978, reflecting the rapid aging of the dominant white population, and more likely to be homeowners (74 percent) and college graduates (46 percent) than they were then.

Democrats are increasingly clustered in coastal cities, while the inland areas of California have become Republican strongholds.

This fragmentation, coupled with ever-lower levels of voter participation, means politicians must cater to an electorate that reflects an ever-narrower slice of the socioeconomic whole while trying to meet the needs of an isolated, nonvoting underclass.

It manifests itself in such things as a chronically unbalanced state budget and political gridlock.